Introduction

Portfolio for Computational Musicology

My corpus will consist of several Albums by U2, divided into 2 notable groups: Albums before 1991 (Boy, October, War, The Joshua Tree, Rattle and Hum) and albums in the 90’s (Achtung Baby, Zooropa, Pop).

The reason I have chosen for this format is the (quite radical at times) disparity between the genres, stylistic choices and contextual meanings between these periods. After the Joshua Tree (1987) this change already started taking shape, but the culmination started with Achtung Baby (1991). U2 used to be a punk/rock band, But chose to change radically in the 90’s, following in the footsteps of the experimental ideas of Producer and Musician Brian Eno. Eno worked with U2 on the Joshua Tree (amongst other things), but employed a much more aetherial, electronic sound in his own works. This, in combination with the rise of ‘dance’ and electronic music in the 90’s, shaped the stylistic choices made by the band throughout the 90’s. With these choices they both lost and gained some fans. I am curious to see how these periods compare, and how we can use spotify to dive into this topic.

A typical track for what I would call the ‘early’ period is “Sunday Bloody Sunday” (Joshua Tree). It is a punkrock song of protest, perfectly fitting the themes and feel of their (previous) albums. A typical track for the late period would be “Zooropa” (Zooropa), and experimental track that is especially adverse when compared to ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’. Now, there aren’t many atypical tracks in the early period, but tracks like ‘One’ (Achtung Baby) and ‘Stay (Faraway, so close)’ (Zooropa) are very atypical inbetween their work in the 90’s.

It will be very interesting to discover in what ways the Spotify API can provide an insight into the disparity between the 2 periods, as well as a more in-depth review of some of the outlying tracks in both periods, also taking into consideration the significant advancements made in the field of music production in and around the 90’s.

On a sidenote, I would like to inform the reader that even though I have made a valiant attempt to create a visually pleasable and feasible template for this dashboard, my lack (or rather complete absence) of computing and coding experience has made this a frustrating and time-consuming task. I have therefore decided to focus on the content of the portfolio, rather than the visual layout. I apologise in advance if this makes my portfolio unclear in any way. As I said, I have tried my very best…

Track-level Features

Row

U2 pre-90’s

Row

U2 90’s

Chroma features

First Time

Mofo

With or Without you

Loudness and Timbre

One

Temporal features

Tempogram ‘Mofo’

Tempogram ‘Surrender’

Classification and Clustering

Classification something

Discussion/Conclusion